A labored history lesson about the social and cultural life of 1845 New York, but not especially entertaining—or...
Fictionalized account of one particularly dismal year toward the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s short and generally unhappy life.
First-timer May focuses on a possible love affair between Poe and the now-forgotten poet Fanny Osgood. In 1845, Poe is living in New York with his ailing young wife/first-cousin Sissy (the real-life Virginia) and Sissy’s mother. Although he has already published many of his most memorable stories, he is barely scraping by, earning money for his poems and reviews wherever he can while launching The Broadway Journal with a partner he dislikes. May’s writing is strongest when it brings across the Poes’ financial desperation—a state not helped by the frequent drunken binges that Poe, a difficult man even when sober, continues to embark upon. After the writer’s one loyal champion and friend, N.P. Willis of The World, publicizes The Raven, Poe briefly becomes the toast of New York and captures the interest of Fanny Osgood, currently separated from her artist husband and living, like Willis and his wife, at the Astor Hotel. Although courted by a wealthy businessman, she is drawn to Poe’s genius. The two exchange letters, but more revealing are the thinly veiled poems they write and publish about each other (included in full in an appendix). When they find themselves a topic of gossip, Fanny flees to her brother’s family in Providence. Poe follows and they consummate their affair, but Poe is racked with guilt concerning Sissy, who has received anonymous letters about Fanny. A now-pregnant Fanny’s only recourse is to return to her husband. Poe loses his magazine, takes a temperance vow, and moves out of town with the dying Sissy. Fanny and Poe’s child is born but does not survive.
A labored history lesson about the social and cultural life of 1845 New York, but not especially entertaining—or enlightening—about Poe.Pub Date: May 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-427-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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